


the heart is a lonely hunter

by NotAllThoseWhoWander



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M, Romanticism, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-08 22:28:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotAllThoseWhoWander/pseuds/NotAllThoseWhoWander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire is in love with a dead man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I got this idea during an Art History lecture about the Pre-Renaissance era in Northern Europe (because, for numerous pathetic reasons, I tend to think about Les Mis a lot in that class). I've been putting off writing it for a couple of days but decided to go ahead with it. I'd love if you gave me feedback or constructive crit!

 

1.

 

_And all that else the years will show,_

_the Poet-forms of stronger hours,_

_The vast Republics that may grow,_

_The Federations and the Powers;_

_Titanic forces taking birthIn divers seasons, divers climes;_

_For we are Ancients of the earth_

_And in the morning of the times_

_  
_"I cannot help but feel," Grantaire said with a touch of dramatic indifference, "that death is soon to be upon me."

"If you persist in your brutalization of that absinthe, it will be." Bahorel, draped across Grantaire's chaise, raised his right fist to examine battered knuckles. "I propose that we go out."

"I don't feel like it." Bent double at his desk, Grantaire felt like a sullen youth. Such petulance had become characteristic in recent weeks, as his sketches became loose and erratic and his professors increasingly disapproving. "You might, if you like."

"The Corinthe is not the same without you. I should miss your voice. In particular, I should miss your voice crying out for a fight." 

"There is always a fight somewhere. Or," Grantaire reached for a small knife, twisting the blade against his pencil's tip. Wood shaved away, revealing a sharpened lead tip. His movements were tight and deft. "someone in search of one."

" _You_ used to always be in search of a fight," Bahorel said with an air of haughty detachment. Grantaire scoffed and shook his head, returning to his sketches. They were entirely, resoundingly, amazingly unsatisfactory.  _  
_

"I cannot. Not tonight." The pencil's tip drifted up; the line it left, delicate, could pass for a curve of cheekbone. Grantaire studied the product: a young woman's face, round-cheeked, luminous eyes. "Perhaps I should draw more _children_."

"Draw me," Bahorel cried, and flung himself with graceless abandon across the arm of the chaise. Grantaire refrained, with forced politeness, from mentioning that he  _had_ drawn Bahoral more times than he cared to count, and a great many of them  _sans vêtements_. 

"Another night," he promised Bahorel, but did not look up when Bahorel left. He had drunk quite a lot of absinthe already and felt very strange, at once light and odd, brilliant and stiff with slowness, his hand cramped but he did not notice. There was wan evening light through the curtains and Grantaire yanked them open with drunken vigor. He later looked upon his sketches and laughed madly. He watched his pitiful fire consume them and laughed even more. 

 

2. 

 

A knock sounded shortly after ten o'clock in the evening. It sounded like a cannon's report.

Grantaire, dozing beside the grate, woke with a start. His fire had dulled to brown embers, and beyond the window Paris was timid with darkness.

How strange, he thought, rising somewhat unsteadily, that time passed like this. You drank a little and fell asleep, while the fire ate itself up in the grate and Paris slipped into a black coat. 

"Grantaire?" Another report. Grantaire took a draught of absinthe; the bottle was shamefully light. 

"Please, be gentle." He opened the door slowly, the movement of it all made his head spin a little. In the hall, three dark figures loomed and swayed in foul semi-darkness. Grantaire stepped aside, allowing them entry. Familiar visages, he thought with a certain cheer, though how they neglected their hair and waistcoats. The taller of the two seemed to bear a certain woe about him, and his coat was rent quite badly up the side. Perhaps he lacked the money to have it repaired, or perhaps he was simply an abysmal tailor. Grantaire recalled that he was called Joly, and was relatively fresh to the trade.

"We had to wait until your landlady turned in," Combeferre said, and they laid the corpse upon Grantaire's chaise. Grantaire stared. He felt very dizzy, and could not help but marvel at how the shrouded body tilted into the space which Bahorel had so recently evacuated. It was a strange thing indeed, the occupation of space.

"I've heard she doesn't care for lifeless tenants," Joly said ungraciously, and turned away from the body to inhale. Grantaire wondered if Joly was frightened of catching some disease from the body; an improbability, or so he had been assured by Combeferre. 

"We are all lifeless tenants, in some house or another." 

Combeferre glanced up at this remark. He considered Grantaire with a funny expression, but - Grantaire thought - refrained from comment. He was handsome. A fine bone structure. Grantaire should like to draw him. He doubted very much that Combeferre, gentle and modest, would consent. 

"We should go. . ." Joly suggested. 

"Wait," Grantaire said. He moved to the chaise and stood beside the body. He did not remove its green oilcloth shroud. "The cause of death?"

Combeferre afforded Grantaire a brief funny glance.

"The victim of childhood illness, I am afraid. He was a student at the University. One of those who fancies himself a politician, I'm sure." There was something sweet and merciful in Combeferre's face, in the way he spoke to Grantaire. "He spent time at the Necker as a boy. Even clever young men cannot outrun a lifetime of illness."

"Indeed not," Joly said, and looked quite worried indeed. 

Grantaire watched them don their coats.

"Here," he said, and thrust the  _francs_ into Combeferre's hand. He always felt a little sinful, offering payment for flesh. Like the men who stole into dark alleys to lift the skirts of made-up  _gamines_. "You shall have the rest next time."

They went out into the lamp-lit darkness, and Grantaire was left with the body. He went to the chaise and carefully removed the shroud, revealing the face first, and then the body -

\- and how light flooded the room!

The young man, beautiful even in lifeless repose, the fine arch of cheekbone and sweep of sternum. His limbs were strong and rounded with muscle, the shoulders broad. Nose fine and straight, glassy eyes cerulean. A fine subject.

"I could ask for no better," Grantaire murmured, and startled himself by speaking aloud. He had not meant to. 

He drew beautifully, rendering in clean strokes of charcoal the man's anatomy. It was more of a lesson than any ill-lit lecture hall could have provided; though Combeferre had offered several times to smuggle Grantaire into a class or operating theatre, if only to better illustrate how the human body appeared after death. It was an offer that Grantaire refused regularly; he far prefered the bodies Combeferre brought him. He thought that most artists prefered the same.

________________

He placed the sheafs of sketches on his desk and drank a little more of the absinthe. With sugar it was very good, the taste rich and herbal, the way that Grantaire fancied an alpine meadow might taste - cool and green-brown, gilded with afternoon sunlight. 

Grantaire was not aware of falling asleep, but it seemed only an instant later he was jerked from some unpenetrable reverie.

"I hope I did not interrupt your repose."

"You startled me. No more than Dionysus happening upon a grieving Ariadne."

"I hope that you should consider me neither." The young man said delicately, running his fingers along Grantaire's hearth mantle. The dark wood was dusty; the tips of his fingers came away gray and gritty. "Either a drunk," and here he paused to glance at the empty absinthe bottle, "or a weeping maid."

"You don't look like a maid," Grantaire said clumsily. "You look every bit the young demigod. The build of Achilles, perhaps the brow of Herakles."

"Appearance is but an earthly distraction. Don't you think?" 

"I am not sure." Grantaire was staring. He became aware that he was staring. Everything felt slow and syrupy, the way that it did on warm evenings when he got drunk with, say, Bahorel and instead of getting loud and racous they were quiet and pensieve. "I had not thought - "

" - that I should speak? Or walk? Or breathe?"

"None of those things, no," Grantaire admitted dumbly. He looked from the prone body on his chaise - how unelegant it seemed now, how terrible and  _stiff_ \- to the slender man before him, stripped to the waist, clad in the rough pants that some political students (fancying themselves among the poor, surely) favored. They were done up, but he did not wear a belt. Grantaire felt quite embarrassed. 

He found this unsettling. He was rarely embarrassed. 

"You are not difficult to surprise, then. Or upset."

"I don't feel myself." 

"Perhaps it's the absinthe." The young man moved at leisure to inspect Grantaire's sketches. "These are lovely. Very deft. Good work. Your professors should be pleased."

"They approve of us - doing this -" he gestured awkwardly to the body. "Students at the Necker supply us with the - you know - and we sketch to teach ourselves better anatomy. It isn't - improper - not what most people would think." 

"You're rambling," the young man - the dead man - said lightly. "Do you often ramble when drunk?"

"Do you not?"

"I do not know. I never was drunk."

"You've cheated yourself of an impressive experience." Grantaire thought it a little gauche to offer wine to a dead man. 

"Circumstances would not permit me to drink; nor, I think, would my morals."

"Funny things," Grantaire said, and tore the cork mercilessly from a bottle of Dupont's finest inexpensive brew. "Morals. I had nearly forgotten about them."

The dead man was very beautiful, and seemed quite alive. He wandered Grantaire's rooms with Grantaire, dog-drunk, at his heels. He seemed quite enchanted with everything, in a quiet and detached way - pausing over the scant bookshelf, remarking rather coolly at some of the titles, idling beside the bed. He fingered a waistcoat that Grantaire had flung across the back of a chair, and stooped to examine a packet of poems which Grantaire had written and planned to dispose of within the week. He was silent. Grantaire watched, shamelessly, the way his muscles moved.

He was dimly aware of drifting back to the fireside, and being aware that it had gotten very late, and possibly commenting on the lateness of the hour, and of the young dead man's handsome golden face floating somewhere above his. 

And then he was waking up with a spinning head and a sour, burnt taste in his mouth, and pallid dawn filtered through the window. There were no curtains.

The dead man lay shrouded on the chaise. Grantaire did not remember re-shrouding the figure. His head ached awfully, and he recalled snatches of dreams in which he had walked barefoot on a beach, the sand cold beneath his heels. Someone had cried, and someone had played a lute, and someone had spoken to him kindly.

It was nine o'clock, and he was already late to class.  

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

2. 

"Grantaire," Jehan Prouvaire said, "are you quite alright?"

"I am not alright. In fact," Grantaire murmured, and in swift strokes of India ink rendered the young man's sweet, narrow face. "I believe that I may be all left. Turn your head a little, will you?"

"I am inclined to tilt it right," Jehan said fairly, and complied. He did not mind sharing the room with Grantaire's corpses; Grantaire believed that this was largely because Jehan was a poet, and poets, like other peculiar breeds of man, did not mind oddities. Perhaps they were accustomed to these things: an amiable drunk, a curtainless room, a lifeless companion.

"I am also inclined," Prouvaire continued, "to allow you the money for some curtains. Damask, I think, would suffice. Combeferre has curtains like that, and Bahorel, and they keep the sun out very nicely." He paused for a moment. His eyelids fluttered closed. They were nice eyelids, Grantaire thought; delicate and freckled. "Bahorel keeps them drawn until after midday, he cites the sun as a true enemy of his in the morning."

"You know Combeferre?"

Jehan was silent - suspiciously so, Grantaire thought - for a moment. His raised chin, freckled visage, bare chest and long hair suggested an impish quality, but it was with candor that he spoke. 

"We met under strange circumstances. I was admiring a certain rose in the Jardin des Plantes, and he a certain moth. I suppose it was a curiosity towards winged things. We see each other often enough - I occupy his couch for hours on end and bother him mercilessly. Did you know that he has a skeleton?"

"I was under the impression that everyone had a skeleton," Grantaire said gloomily, and tapped the edge of his paintbrush over the page. Dark India ink freckled the drawing; on the chaise, Jehan twisted and rolled his shoulders. The movement was easy and careless. His skin looked warm. 

"An anatomical skeleton. Kept for study."

"I shouldn't think a decent man like Combeferre would keep one for any  _other_ purpose," Grantaire said prudently.

"I should refrain from commenting upon  _your_ housemates," Jehan stood in a fluid motion, casting a glance towards the dead man. 

"There is a shroud," Grantaire said, by way of excuse. He knew that Jehan did not really mind. Jehan retrieved his shirt from the back of Grantaire's chair, and he buttoned it carelessly. His waistocoat was ill-fitting but he did not seem to mind, or even to notice that the edges were frayed and the seams gaping in places. Jehan came and bent towards Grantaire and kissed him on one cheek, and then the other. He smelled like incense. His lips were warm and dry.

"Good-bye," Jehan said pleasantly, "I will be by tomorrow, if that is alright with you."

"It is all left with me, always," Grantaire flicked India ink across the portrait. "This will be dry, and you may take it if you like. I'll be drunk tomorrow. Consider yourself warned."

"Considered," Jehan said, and mock-saluted, and then bowed in a frilly ridiculous movement and then was gone.

Grantaire sat alone, quite pensive, feeling a little empty - as though someone had pulled out a drain at the bottom of his chest. He was not entirely sure why he felt this way. 

"I find him peculiar."

Grantaire lifted his chin. The dead man was standing in the doorway. He looked radiant. The sun came in behind him and lit his body in long, kind shafts. He was wearing a shirt and gray waistcoat. His hair was burnished and wild in the generous light. He looked like a classic god, better suited to cavorting in mountain glens than strolling the broad avenues of Paris. It occured to Grantaire that while to err was human, to stroll was Parisian. 

"He's a poet," Grantaire offered, by way of excuse. "You are dressed."

"Would you like me to undress?" There was an open quality to his expression that Grantaire found, frankly, disconcerting. "I will, if you like. You draw me. I've watched you."

"I didn't know." Grantaire's fingers found his brush and ink, but they felt slow and clumsy. Though he was certainly sober, he felt drunk.

"There are lots of thing you don't know."

"No man can hold the world in his mind. No man can know all of the cosmos." 

"Certainly not. What is my name?"

Grantaire felt a warm blush of shame; perhaps not shame, perhaps something just kindred to it. A brother. A cousin. "I do not know."

"But you know my back, and shoulders, and face."

"Yes." 

"How," the dead man paused, delicate. He shifted easily from the doorway and moved about the room at ease. "Human."

Grantaire was aware of laughing. It was a dim sound. "How could I be anything else?"

The dead young man looked at him for a brief and cutting moment. "How else, indeed."

Grantaire laughed again, forcing the sound out of his throat; his mouth tasted ashen and looking at the dead man suddenly hurt. He watched the dead man, the young man - but  _dead man_ was so much sharper on his tongue - watch the corpse under the shroud in the corner. He estimated that within the day the corpse would begin to - to put it indelicately - decompose. 

"Enjolras," someone said, and Grantaire realized that the dead man had come closer, was now leaning over him with a quiet and unnerving intensity. "My name is Enjolras."

"Enjolras," Grantaire said, and again, the sound familiar and round on his tongue. A good name. Enjolras's  _nearness_ was making him dizzy; he felt every bit Leda, or Patroclus, dumbed and muted in the presence of a god—of Zeus, or Thetis. Cold sand beneath bare feet, and every inch, every sorry aching molecule of your bitter mortal  _leaning into the touch_ the golden effortless eternal touch. 

He did not notice when Enjolras left; indeed, he did not feel himself at all. 

He was dimly aware of a shadow moving about him, and was struck by the thought that he might be falling asleep, but when he woke it was dark outside and Enjolras was gone.

* * *

They went out drinking, he and Bahoral. The night was cold and oppresive with the suggestion on oncoming snow, and the Corinthe a bright warm haven in comparison. 

There were a number of grisettes around, and Bahorel insisted that they include several of the girls in a game of billiards. He made a show of losing to Grantaire. Grantaire did not want to win. His mind was occupied in its entirity by Enjolras. How horrifying it was, he thought, that one's mind could be so entirely consumed by a single entity. A ray of light entering a dusty window does less damage; it, at least, allows room for air, and for curtains. It does not occupy entirely.

"You are no fun," Bahorel said after a time. "And I can tell that you would rather be at home, with your paint and corpses."

"Paint and corpses," Grantaire said distantly. He tried in vain to enjoy himself, but was struck with the unnerving realisation that he was putting on a very poor front. All he could think of was Enjolras's body, the curves and lines of a bare chest. The taste of a name in one's mouth, ribs under a palm, fumbling hands. A strange desperation mounted inside him; it forced words from his mouth - he bid goodbye to Bahorel and the grisettes, paid for a bottle of wine and went out into the gathering dusk. It was quite cold. Grantaire did not feel the cold, though; in fact, he did not feel anything.

It was a very strange feeling, and somewhat unwelcome. 

In the fading light, Paris was enlivening. 

Grisettes and young men thronged the streets; there were whores and ragged men out by the numbers, a few genteel passerby of the sort who always seemed to be hurrying towards a destination infinitely more elegant,  _gamins_ flocking round street-bands, skirting through crowds. At the corner of Rue Saint-Michael Grantaire saw a little group of them waltzing to an old man's fiddle music, and scarcely a block later another group ganging up on a nut-vender. 

"I 'aven't eaten in two days, monsieur," a scrawny youth with russett hair cried, swinging from a street-lamp's pole. "And 'ow bout if my sister comes 'nd pays you in the morning?"

"Clear out of here," the vender said loudly, and sifted his nuts in the tin pans. "Go on, clear out."

But Grantaire, taking pity on the urchins, fished a  _sous_ from his pocket and paid in full. The vender scooped out a portion of nuts and handed them - reluctantly - to the little boy in a paper cone. As he was so occupied, a handful of other urchins swooped in and liberated the pans of heaping fistfuls of nuts. They fled into the dark, laughing and shrieking, and the vender swore fluently. 

"That was kind of you."

Grantaire wheeled. Enjolras stood on the cold street, a dark jacket folded prudently over his arm, watching silently. 

"I wasn't - you shouldn't - out here - "

"You would have me confined," Enjolras said, and fell into step beside Grantaire. Grantaire shook his head hard, as if ridding his ears of water. The way that Enjolras spoke did not suggest question, but statement.

"I wonder why you'd wander the streets of Saint Michael when all of Heaven lies at your feet."

Enjolras turned and allowed Grantaire a swift and exacting smile. Lamplight cut his face up brutally; all shadow and light, lines that Grantaire ached to draw, or to touch. 

"My cynic," he said, "is Paris not Heaven?"

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I. Pre-Renaissance/Early Renaissance artists really did use corpses to study human anatomy; however, I'm unsure of whether or not this practice carried over into the 19th century. I couldn't find any resources, and the internet turned up nothing - so if anyone knows about this (any Art History university/college students, perhaps?), please make contact and inform me!
> 
> II. I'm also not sure how realistic the buying/selling of corpses would be (especially since Combeferre and Joly are medical students) but I assume that it's a little dubious. 
> 
> III. The poem at the beginning is by Alfred Tennyson, an excerpt from a longer piece published in 1842.


End file.
